Digital Inspiration

Do you have an account on Flickr, Google Picasa, YouTube, Facebook or Box.net ? If yes, get this free Universal Uploader without a second thought - you'll love it. Fire Universal Uploader is a Firefox extension that lets you upload and also download videos, pictures, documents and other files to the above websites from a common interface. Getting started is simple - click the dropbox icon in the Firefox status bar, select one of service where you wish to upload the file(s) and then drag-n-drop the pictures or videos - you content will be online almost the next minute. The Universal Uploader is like a two-way FTP client for YouTube, Flickr and other sites - you can browse stuff that's already available in your account or upload new media file. The upcoming version could have support for Google Video, Photobucket and more. To download the file uploader, visit addons.mozilla.org . In case of Flickr and Picasaweb, you'll have to authorize the service before uploading

Here are some of most popular media player software along with a quick description of their features. They help you play audio/video files, organize your digital media collection, rip or burn CDs, play videos in full screen and much much more. Take the Poll Which one of these media player is your favorite ? Please tell us through this quick 10 second poll. (If your personal favorite is missing in this list, do mention the name in the "Others" category). Windows Media Player - This popular digital media player from Microsoft can play most common audio-video formats, audio CDs and DVDs. WMP can be also used for copy tracks from music CDs to your computer or for burning new CDs with your music files. Excellent support for organizing music through tags and ratings. Media Player Classic  - It's like the light-weight edition of the official Windows Media Player from Microsoft. Once you install the k-lite codecs separately, the Media Player Classic can play most video formats

Just hours before the iPhone launch, dozens of iPhone books, training DVDs and accessories like LCD screen protector, iPhone car chargers, iPhone Leather pouch, etc have gone for sale at the Amazon Online store. David Pogue's missing iPhone manual is very likely to rule the market. iPhone: The Missing Manual - Written by New York Times columnist David Pogue, this book teaches you how to extend iPhone's usefulness by exploiting its links to the Web as well as its connection to Macs or PCs; how to save money using Internet-based messages instead of phone calls; and how to fill the iPhone with TV shows and DVDs for free. iPhone For Dummies - Written by USA Today Personal Technology Columnist Edward C. Baig, this book illustrates how to make and receive phone calls, play podcasts, music, videos, and photo slideshows, browse the Internet, send and receive e-mails and instant messages, take and organize photos, sync with your desktop and troubleshoot common iPhone problems .

Scribd , as most of us know is a hugely popular service for uploading and sharing Microsoft Office documents or PDF ebook online. Scribd can also convert documents to Flash files which can then be embedded in web pages . The other good point about Scribd is that you don't require an account in order to upload or convert documents into other formats like PDF, Flash Paper or MP3. To upload documents to Scribd, you can either use their browser based uploader tool but what about documents that are already on the web ? Would you save them to your hard drive for uploading to Scribd ? One of the option is to use the Slurping feature where you append the URL of your web document to the following URL and it gets copied on Scribed automatically. http://www.scribd.com/slurp?url=[DOCUMENT_URL] If that sounds confusing, get this new Firefox extension called Scribd Slurper  - say you come a PDF document in Google search that you want to save on scribd - just right click that search result

Internet filters are active everywhere - Flickr is banned in Iran & UAE , BBC & Wikipedia are blocked in China , Blogspot blogs are banned in Pakistan , YouTube & Photobucket are prohibited for US army overseas while social sites like Bebo, MySpace or Facebook may be banned in your office .  Some companies even block access to mail websites like Yahoo or GMail under the pretext of security. Click To Play In the past, we have discussed atleast a dozen methods to help you access blocked websites that are banned in your office, school or by the government of your country. Here's a new method for unblocking websites - you'll probably enjoy it more than the previous hacks because it takes the geekiness out of the whole process and make it extremely easy to access blocked URLs . Opera provides a free online tool called Opera Mini Simulator that emulates the Opera mobile phone browser on your desktop computer. The tool is done in java and is quite popular among web

See what happens when you make a search for "adsense" on MIT website. Surprising because the MIT search engine is internally powered by Google web search.

Graphita Live Studio is a fun way of decorating your digital photographs with Photoshop style brushes, speech bubbles, post-it notes, Devil horns, sparkling tooth and much much more. Upload your picture to the web-based Graphita studio editor and drag-drop the doodles from the object palette over the photograph. Every object can be rotated or resized to fit the size of your picture. [Press the Shift key while resizing objects to maintain the aspect ratio] Pretty neat application to make your boring pictures look interesting and even funny.  www.graphita.com  [via David Shantz]

If you are among the millions of souls who live outside the US but crazy after the new touch screen Apple iPhone, here's something interesting - you could get an unlocked iPhone in the grey market of India and other Asian countries very very soon that will work with your existing GSM SIM card. iPhone is a quad-band GSM mobile phone so it will working internationally in countries outside the US though you'll have to ask AT&T to turn on international roaming on the iPhone and that the places you’re going offer GSM coverage. Officially, the iPhone won't be in India until 2008 but you could get the unlocked version from the grey markets of Palika Bazar or Sarojini Nagar in New Delhi for around Rs 30,000 (~$650). Or you could purchase an iPhone from Apple store, get it unlocked in India and pop in your GSM SIM card. The grey market dealers told BS that they can unlock the iPhone cellphone for ~$25 so that it can be used on any GSM carrier network. It's a surprise t

MIT School of Engineering have launched a video sharing website called "MIT Tech TV" for showcasing lecture recordings, student presentations and other video content particularly about science, engineering and technology. While the MIT TechTV videos can be viewed by anyone on the web, only members with an @mit.edu email address - students, faculty, MIT staff or even the alumni - can upload videos on the MIT TechTV portal. MIT TechTV website, which looks the same as Blip.TV with a new skin, has no connection with the TechTV channel (now G4TV). This is MIT's second attempt to share knowledge with the outside world. Earlier, MIT had launched the very popular MIT OpenCourseware project to make the course materials used in the teaching of virtually all of MIT's courses available on the Web, free of charge. techtv.mit.edu/   [MIT Tech TV] ocw.mit.edu  [OpenCourseware]

If you have ever been to a blogspot blog, you would have definitely noticed the 40-pixels wide Navbar that appears by default at the top of every Blogger-powered blog. This navbar is like Google's own version of StumbleUpon where visitors can search existing blog or discover new Blogger blogs just by clicking the NextBlog link. And if you are logged-in to your Google account, the navbar turns into a personal dashboard toolbar similar to what you have seen on Wordpress.com blogs. Though Google provides no "disable button", tons of blogspot users have hidden the navbar on their blog through simple CSS tricks which available for both new Blogger  and classic Blogger  templates. The next important question is whether you are violating any Google policies or Blogger's Terms of Service by removing the navbar ? The Blogger's TOS page  makes no reference to navbar while Google representatives in the Blogger support group  (nickname: Blogger Employee) have always ign

You will get answers to all these and more in Beth Kanter's excellent video tutorial on web analytics software with main focus on Google Analytics. Other than learning about Analytics, this video gives you an idea about the usefulness of screencasts if they are properly scripted and produced right.

Google today introduced new Adsense ad formats that have rounded corners - the ads are available in two option - slightly rounded and very rounded (the former has a slighly lower corner radius that the latter). If you are displaying Adsense Ads with background color same as the border color (which is recommended for high CTR ), this new format would be of little interest as the ads will essentially look the same. In terms of Adsense implement,  the following variable will be added to your ad script depending on the version you select: google_ui_features = "rc:6"; [slightly rounded] google_ui_features = "rc:10"; [very rounded] google_ui_features = "rc:0"; [default, square corners] Probably the rc: numbers indicates the pixel radius.

These blog popularity graphs are based on number of incoming links and number of members who have made them as favorites respectively. Notice the steep climb from position ten and above in both the figures where the slots are occupied by the who's who of blogging community. And it's almost flat from position 50 onwards implying how tough it is for blogs in that region to maintain their current position in the popularity charts. Pete Johnson , Chief Architect of HP.com, draws an interesting comparison between these blog popularity charts and the Long Tail curve of Chris Anderson - "there's plenty of ad revenue for the right suitors in that flat tail". True.

KoolWire is a new and wonderful email based file conversion service to help you convert your Microsoft Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt), Excel Spreadsheets (.xls) or even pictures into Adobe PDF documents.  Just compose a new email message, attach document(s) that have to be converted into PDF and send the email to pdf@koolwire.com . The PDF file(s) should arrive in your inbox the next moment. See alternative: Convert Files and Documents by Email The big advantage is that Koolwire PDF converter requires no software installation and, unlike Google Docs or PDFOnline, you don't have to upload documents to any webserver in order to print them as PDF - just send them across as email attachments. PDF creation couldn't be simpler. Best of all, you can attach multiple documents / images to the same email message and Koolwire will batch convert them into PDF. Don't think any free PDF writer software offers such a convenient option to create multiple PDFs in one go.

These are some of the most common problems faced by WordPress bloggers when they're using Windows Live Writer for uploading images, publishing new blog posts, posting drafts online or simply editing the existing blog posts. Problem with Template Detection : Windows Live Writer cannot detect and download the latest theme of your blog for Live Web Preview. Solution : Make sure the following snippet exists in your blog header (in the <head> tag) <link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http:// www.myblog.com /xmlrpc.php?rsd" /> Problem with Speed : Does it take too long for you to start Windows Live Writer or it hangs for no reason ? Solution : Windows Live Writer checks for software updates in the background and this may slow down the software or make it consume lot of your CPU power. The solution is to type services.msc in your Run box, select the "Windows Live Setup Service" and press th

Build a waterproof and dust resistant case for your Digital Camera - picture says it all. To protect your digital camera from water, humidity and dust - add a roll of cardboard around the lens, then slide the camera body inside a condom (non-lubricated), also slip a packet of silica-gel to absorb moisture and tie the knot. Best of all, you can still shoot pictures or video while it's inside the pouch though the quality may not be perfect. Underwater photography anyone ? More details at Instructables . A similar method can be used to protect mobile phones while you're inside the swimming pool.

Nick Denton recently accused Fred Wilson, Om Malik, Mike Arrington, Richard MacManus and several other top tech bloggers of accepting money from Microsoft for endorsing their "People Ready" campaign . Though Om has withdrawn the Microsoft ad from his blog fearing that it compromises his editorial integrity, it's virtually impossible to digest that he or any of the other blogging elites would ever do this. Can you buy a quote from Fred Wilson for few thousand dollars ? Never. Fred earlier called Nick a genius for turning Valleywag into a successful business. Wonder how he reacts to this episode . [Fred still loves Nick and Valleywag] Neil Chase, VP at Federated Media Publishing, has posted a detailed response saying that bloggers were not paid for this: In the case of this Microsoft campaign, the marketers asked if our writers would join a discussion around their "people ready" theme. Microsoft is an advertiser on our authors' sites, but it's

If the current Web 2.0 generation continues to use Facebook for the next 40 years, here's how a Facebook profile page might look like. Brilliant. Thanks Scoble .

Should I use the 300x250 Adsense Rectangle or the much wider 336x280 for maximizing clicks? What do I select - 4 or 5 ads per adlink unit ? Will text only ads perform better than text+image ads ? Should I hide the colored border ? These are some very common questions among web publishers especially those who have just gained admission to the University of Adsense. While the answer is to keep on experimenting, most Adsense experts employ a simple technique called "AB Split Testing" to optimize their Adsense ads. The basic idea is to display different Adsense formats at the same location simultaneously but randomly. [This is done using the random() function in Javascript that generates a number between 0 and 1 with equal probability] Here's a sample scenario to help you determine what format works best for your site - 300x250 or 338x280 ? Step 1: Create two custom Adsense channels - name them as 300x250 and 336x280. Step 2: Generate the Adsense Javascript code fo

Vodafone UK has created a good interactive demo to help you understand how some of the most popular websites on the internet look like on your cell phones. The Vodafone commercial uses a Nokia N95 to simulate MySpace, YouTube, BBC, Google Maps, Amazon, Yahoo, Hotmail and eBay - you just have to move the mouse over various locations of the street and watch the website pages change on the N95 screen.  Mobile Internet Demo   Good for folks who haven't switched to an internet enabled mobile phone yet - the Vodafone websites also says that Nokia N95, E65, N76 and Nokia 6300 are best mobile phones for Internet though the complete list also mentions Blackberry and Sony phone. Surprisingly, the Vodafone demo makes no mention of blogs, personalized homepages or newsreaders but do check this "Backseat blogging" billboard spotted by  Steve Clayton .

Software License details of Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, Microsoft Office, Windows XP and tons of other software can easily be located on Google by running this simple query: "Belarc Advisor Current Profile" "Software Licenses"  " Software Name "   key: These are actually real software inventory  reports generated by Belarc Advisor , a popular tool often used to backup software licenses . The only problem is that innocent users have placed these HTML reports in public directories of their web servers, the search engine spiders index them and in-turn expose the secret software keys to the whole world. Though most new Adobe and Microsoft software will require additional web or phone activation, that is not mandatory if the Belarc reports have Volume License keys. Scary.

How do you download your entire blog archive offline? The good old option is to use website ripping software like wget or HTTrack to create a mirror copy of any blog with images on your hard disk. If that sounds too geeky, here's an excellent alternative - Greg Duncan has created a free blogger backup software that's extremely easy-to-use and gives lot of control over the backup process. Related:  Backup Blogger Posts on Wordpress With Blogger Backup, you can backup your blog posts into a single file or one blog post per file or multiple posts per file. The future versions may even save your blog posts into PDF files that you can distribute as eBooks. Blogger backup can download everything or you can do incremental backups meaning backup just the new posts since your last backup or download blog posts posted between any two given dates. Best of all, Blogger Backup can also extract and save your Blog readers comments offline . No image support yet but you can alway

As these screenshots show, some incoming links on YouTube videos are found to contain username/passwords of FTP servers that could allow anyone to login into these servers.  If Google doesn't fix this immediately, it could possibly become a big security issue for FTP sites whose credentials are now available in Google cache. Earlier these YouTube links had revealed clicks on Adsense Gadgets ads . The latest issue was discovered by Rohan Pinto of konkan.tv/ . To ensure that your FTP servers are not in the YouTube database, run the following query: site:youtube.com "clicks from ftp" your_server_name

Dislike typing on the computer keyboard or the tiny cell phone ? You can still write a beautiful text blog - just get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil to jot down your blog posts. These are called handwritten blogs - the paper note with your text is scanned using a digital camera or a scanner and posted on the web as a regular photograph.  Even PostSecret is an handwritten blog. There an entire Flickr group devoted to the community of handwritten bloggers. It would help if you have a good handwriting style but sorry, no Google Juice for you as search engine bots can't read your handwritten blog posts. Very creative. More examples at  flickr.com/handwrittenblogs/  and mivox.com/ .

Techmeme will probably remain silent today as bloggers have just found a new reason to stay away from blogs - the addictive and much awaited new version of Desktop Tower Defense Flash game has finally rolled out Go waste your time play the game at handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/   For those new to the DTD game, here's how Rafe at CNet describes it: Our desk is under attack by invaders coming from both land and air. Your only solution? Defend it at all costs, using tiny turrets. Fight off waves and waves of attackers that get more challenging with each onslaught. Use your victory winnings to fortify and buy more defensive units. Losing this battle means losing your humanity. No wonder, DTD won the top honors at Webware. And you can't download Desktop Tower Defense offline - the Flash swf file requires an active net connection.

Too lazy to install the new Office 2007 or Windows Vista on your machine ? Worried that the new software might break existing stuff on your computer or may not work at all ? Here's something for you - Windows Vista cum Office 2007 inside Windows XP. Microsoft today released a free combo VHD edition of Windows Vista and Office 2007 Professional which includes Publisher, Excel, Outlook, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, and Word. You can download this all-in-one package from Microsoft Download Center and run it on your Windows XP computer without making any modifications by using the free Microsoft Virtual PC software. Start the Virtual PC software and just open the Windows Vista cum Office 2007 image - the software will run independent of your existing XP SP2 setup and will not alter or install anything on the computer. Excited ? There's a small catch - though the Office 2007 / Vista image file is free, it is a bit bulky (~2 GB to be exact) and requires addition 10 GB of

Vuvox creates extremely impressive Flash presentations from your videos, photos, music like you've never seen before. To create your own Vuvox presentation, simply collect the media files into Vuvox from your hard drive or pull them direct from the web (Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket, etc), choose one of the 3D styles and publish. The final presentation will look stunning though it took only couple of minutes if not seconds to create it from scratch. In one of the styles, your pictures and videos appear on the branches and leaves of a tree and they grow as you add more media. Another style reminds me of the Microsoft Coffee computer table - you move, resize and rotate pictures on the computer screen with your mouse instead of your fingers. Each presentation can be viewed directly on the Vuvox website or you can embed them in web pages. If you have to showcase you portfolio to clients, look no further than Vuvox. Presentation does matter. www.vuvox.com/  | Sample  |   DEMO Launc

Unlike the previous image , this is no Photoshop version of Google Phone - it's real picture released by LG. The Google phone will be released around the iPhone launch but in Europe, not North America. Dubbed LG-KU580, this CDMA phone provides one click access to GMail, Google Maps (the LG official says Google Earth?) and Google Web search. The design looks similar to LG "chocolate phone." This will be released in Europe this week with a price tag of somewhere between $300 and $400. Also included is a a 2-megapixel camera, an MP3 player and Bluetooth. Google's applications have been embedded into cell phones before but this is the first time its big three features - search, e-mail and mapping - have all been incorporated into one. Full story at  Korea Times  [ via , via ]

Google Picasa is more than just a simple photo editing and management software. You can create wall posters , screen savers, photo collages or even movies of your digital pictures with Picasa. There's another very impressive feature - it can convert your picture collection into professional looking web photo albums that you can either publish on websites, email them to friends as Zips or just save locally - No CSS, HTML or JavaScript knowledge required. Watch this YouTube video showing how an HTML photo gallery created inside Picasa looks like - took less than a minute to create the entire photo album . To create a Photo album in Picasa, select the photos and put them in the Picasa tray by clicking the Hold button. Next goto Album - Export as HTML page . Select the picture size, web album template and click export. That's it. While Picasa comes with an impressive array of templates, you can download additional templates from paulvanroekel.nl  The above picture gallery w

AddThis [ review ] now offers a beautiful alternative to social bookmarking icons or those 16x16 pixel images that clutter the footer of almost every blog post on the web. With AddThis, you can easily put links to all popular social bookmarking websites in a two-column drop down that appears only when someone hovers the mouse over the Bookmark button - the icons and links stay hidden or invisible otherwise. If a visitor cannot find his/her favorite social bookmarking site in the AddThis menu, they can click the "More.." link access all other other social bookmarking services. Very cool! Just add the following code to your blog template. <!-- AddThis Bookmark Button BEGIN --> <script type="text/javascript">   addthis_url    = location.href;     addthis_title  = document.title;  </script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" ></script> <!-- AddThis Bookmark Button

Want site visitors to print or download your blog posts as PDF documents ? PDF Online, the free PDF conversion service that helps you create PDF files of your Microsoft Office documents, has released a new online tool for converting HTML web pages to PDFs. Here's how the new service works - bloggers add a small Javascript snippet in the blog templates, visitors can click the "Save Page as PDF" button and the current web page will be rendered as a PDF document. Though the "SavePagesAsPDF" service is in closed beta, you can still give it a try as show below: <script type="text/javascript"> function savePageAsPDF() {    var pURL = "http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=" + escape(document.location.href);   window.open(pURL, "PDFOnline", "scrollbars=yes, resizable=yes,width=640, height=480,menubar,toolbar,location"); </script> <a href="javascript:savePageAsPDF()">

Widgets (aka Gadgets) are now found everywhere on the web - people use them for cross promoting their blogs, running picture slide-shows in the sidebar, sharing favorite music or video clips, displaying Amazon Shopping wish-list and more. Two of my favorite blog widget providers are YourMinis and Widgetbox - both offer detailed stats and an option to embed widgets in your Blogger, MySpace, FaceBook, Netvibes, Google IG, PageFlakes or other accounts automatically. Let's look at them more closely: WidgetBox Blidget - Type in your blog address and you instantly get a blog widget in wide or long skyscraper formats. They have some extremely nice color gradients, the font styles are very appealing and you can display just the article headline or even full posts inside the widget. There's neither an option to resize the widget nor can you configure the colors according to your site design. YourMinis RSS Widget - If you think normal is boring, you'll love YourMinis. They g

Google's decision to shut down Made-for-Adsense websites and Adsense Arbitragers could be affecting the earnings of regular Adsense publishers. Several members of Adsense forums at WebMasterWorld and DigitalPoint have reported significant drop in CPM and CTR values in the current month (June 2007). Here are some Adsense CPM / CTR figures reported by members in the discussions: 1. Page views with Adsense: unchanged, EPC: down 25%, CTR: down 15%, Revenue: significantly down. 2. EPC down about 20% from last month. 3. I've gone into a freefall today. Epc down by 80% across a variety of sites and topics. 4. I'm beginning to think there has been a new flawed algorithm added with good intentions, but bad results, that is doing this and is causing a lot of advertisers earnings to fall. 5. Clicks, traffic remains the same. but the revenues are going down about %50-60 6. June - Down 50% 7. CTR is down 40%. Net result is less money. 8. At the moment we are looking at our st

Starting next month, CNN.com website will sport a refreshing new design. The new site will offer wider (575x325) video clips and they'll will be fetching related blog posts for every article using Sphere blog search engine. [expect some traffic if you cite a CNN story] If you would like to preview the new US edition of CNN.com, visit beta.cnn.com . The international edition of CNN.com will however be unveiled only on July 1st. Like all other video sharing websites, CNN too has moved from Windows Media to Flash Video - so you'll no longer require the Windows Media codec to watch CNN videos inside your web browser. CNN has also added Live news video feeds and the entire archive of news videos on CNN.com will now be available to all for free. Since the CNN news videos are now streamed from pdl.stream.aol.com/cnn/ as FLV files, it will be much simpler to save CNN videos locally.

   More blogging taglines for T-Shirts on PrintPerfection and CafePress .

If you are a startup company planning to hire some web celebrity (like a high-profile blogger), make sure your web servers are capable of handling the web traffic - it could be equivalent to getting Digged, Slashdotted, GigaOmed, Scobleized and TechCrunched simultaneously. The following Alexa graph depicts the traffic at Podtech.net (maroon) and Zillow.com (blue) - look at the spike in traffic when Scoble resigned from Microsoft to join the podcasting startup. In case of Zillow, traffic peaked when Vanessa quit Google to join Zillow .

Long ago, Google released the Web Comments extension that shows which blog posts are linking to a web page that we are currently reading in Firefox - an extremely neat idea but not always helpful because it shows only the latest posts linking to the current web page - there's no option to sort results by blog authority or to filter spam blogs. Imagine if you were able to instruct Blogger Web Comments to show commentary only from certain blogs / bloggers that you trust - that's where BlogRovR comes into the picture. You can think of BlogRovR as a far more useful and customizable version of Google Web Comments - both are Firefox add-ons and help you track incoming links but the former gives more flexibility and spam-free results guaranteed. When you install BlogRovR, it is pre-configured with a bundle of most popular blog feeds (like GigaOm, Mashable, TechCrunch, Scobleizer, etc) - you may edit this list and include your personal favorite blogs individually or just import yo

Do you know that Apple Safari browser has an in-built screen capture feature - it's not for taking snapshots of wide or long scrolling web pages but a perfect tool for grabbing the visible portions of the web page as an image (very similar to Print Screen key with auto-save). Apple never told you about their secret screen capture tool because they use it for getting bug reports from Safari Users. Goto Help, Report Bugs to Apple and select "Send screen shot of current web page" - As you press submit, the screenshot will be automatically saved in the temp folder of your computer (like C:\temp) as a BMP image file (Safxxx.bmp) You can even manually type the URL of the website that you want to save as an image. Also see: Capture Website Screenshots Online Important: If you are worried about privacy, don't use this feature since the data is also sent to Apple. [May help when you are in a cyber cafe where the computer has no application other than the web browse

Just ten days ahead of the much-hyped iPhone launch, Apple has released a smartphone matrix comparing the physical dimensions, talk time and battery life of some of the most popular smartphones that are available in the market today. As per the matrix, Apple iPhone is the thinnest smartphone (half the thickness of N95 or Treo 750) with the largest screensize and Wi-Fi capabilities. [ pdf ] While there's no option to swap the drained battery of an iPhone with a full recharged one, the promised eight hours of talktime and 250 hours of standby time should bring enough cheers to those who are planning to queue up outside the Apple stores at 0600 hours June 29, 2007. In related news , a new report has suggest that 19 million Americans have strong interest in buying the iPhone, 67% of who are subscribers on other carrier networks. Update: Nokia N95 is a Wi-Fi enabled phone and Apple has now updated the phone comparison chart.

Try googling "GOOG" (the stock ticker symbol of Google) and you are likely to see the following ads: Filthy rich? We'll help - Throw away your newfound cash at Woot. You're welcome. LuxurySiliconValley.com  - $3 Million+ homes and condos for sale in the Silicon Valley Surprisingly, Google currently has no ads for people googling for BRK.B (Berkshire Hathaway Inc.) - this stock trades at 7x the stock price of Google For MSFT (Microsoft) and YHOO (Yahoo) - the ads are related to jobs in both cases: Write beautiful code? - www.ooyala.com/careers [Thanks Rakesh ]

Good news YouTube fans - you have one less username / password combination to remember since you can now move your YouTube data to Google account. See: Multiple Sign-in for Gmail and Google Accounts And if you have never signed-up for YouTube before, you can now create a new YouTube account with your existing Google Account. [you'll still need to supply an additional YouTube username though which is kind of strange] Everything remains the same except that a new YouTube icon will show up in your Google Account Services page. What's a Google Account - if you are on GMail, Google Groups, Adsense, iGoogle, Google checkout, etc - that's your Google Account - it may not necessarily be a @gmail.com address. If you would like to unlink your YouTube and Google Account association , goto youtube.com/my_account_unlink . If you unlink your accounts, you will no longer be able to login to YouTube with your Google account. Your YouTube account will stay the same otherwise, a

Click To Play [this post contains a video which may not be visible in your newsreader] Philips created this Cheerleading Girls Generator for the FIFA World cup 2006 - just type in some text message and click "Cheer Up". Time waster but fun. Links: Cheer Up Generator | Sample Video

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft  is probably one of the best and most popular blog editing software around for Windows platform. Have you explored all the wonderful features, tips and tricks of using Windows Live Writer ? If not, here's a comprehensive Windows Live Writer tutorial cum guide to help you become a power blogger: Embed Video Clips from YouTube and Facebook There's a very easy way of embedding video clips inside your blog posts - just copy the video embed code from YouTube or Google Video and paste that inside the normal view of Windows Live Writer (or simple drag-n-drop). You don't have to switch to the HTML view of Windows Live Writer as the software is smart enough to recognize the Flash video code and renders it just perfect. Related: How to Embed Anything in your Website Do you Paste or Paste Special ? When you paste a block of formatted rich text in WLW using the standard Paste command (Ctrl+V), all the font styles and hyperlinks appear e

The half baked public beta of Safari 3 bought enough bad PR for Apple and so they have silently released a new version - Safari 3.0.1. The new patch fixes certain security issues  but the font display problems persist on lot of computers. Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Safari (notice the random fonts in the menu bar, bookmarks and the About dialog) You'll have to redo the entire exercise  of editing the fonts.plist file in order to see the menu bars and websites like Yahoo or Amazon correctly.  The other option is to manually copy the Lucida Grande fonts from your c:\windows\fonts folder to the C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources folder. It has worked for lot of Safari users. If you don't see the toolbar or status bar in Safari 3, copy the Defaults.plist from C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\ to C:\Documents and Settings\ <user name> \Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari and rename it to Preferences.plist - this will reset everything

How do you find videos on the web related to some topic? The Youtube website is probably a good place to start but if you confine the search only to YouTube, you will miss so much exciting stuff that exists in other places. DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vimeo, and other video sharing websites may not be as big as YouTube but they still have a great fan following and host tons of video clips that may well be of your interest. We often ignore searching video content on these "non-YouTube" sites because of lack of time - fortunately, this problem is now a thing of the past with uLinkx - a comprehensive video search engine to help you conveniently search multiple video websites from one place. uLinkx provides RSS search feeds for your video search queries. And you can also watch any of these videos without leaving the uLinkx website - no more hitting the back or forward buttons in your browser. My favorite feature is the Live Video search which is like a common wrapper for all

The YouTube Videos website sports a new look today that looks cleaner and more usable with the re-arranged modules. The site has moved from a 3-column layout to a 2-column with the embed section now placed just below the actual video clip. They have added two new features and also removed few things: Other than the cosmetic changes, the very interesting news is that YouTube is now giving users an option to embed video clips on their sites with or without the related video thumbnails. This option is available near the Embed box. For existing videos in your blog, you can insert the parameter "&rel0" to the Youtube URL to include related video clips or "&rel1" to hide the related videos - the default setting is that related videos will be shown in the video clip. Another enhancement is that use can now share YouTube videos on Digg, Delicious, Furl, Reddit and StumbleUpon directly from the YouTube interface. YouTube has removed the favorites link tha

Thumbstrips is a wonderful Firefox extension that helps you view recently visited web pages in a visual manner - it's a more user friendly and powerful approach than the native Firefox History view (Ctrl+H). Thumbstrips, like an automatic screen capture program, takes screenshots of the websites that you are visiting and also records other details like how long you stayed on that web page and the number of times you viewed that page in your current session. With recording turned on, press F2 and the website thumbnail images will display as a filmstrip in chronological order - move your cursor over the thumbnails to browse through your web history or right click any image to get more details about your interaction with that particular webpage. Since thumbstrips will also save the associated HTML source code of web pages, you can use it for searching the browser history with keywords that may be in the title, URL or body of the webpage. The thumbnail images can also be saved to

Imagine typing "whois xyz.com" inside GTalk to find out who owns that web domain name. Or saying "alexa abc.com" will show you the Alexa Traffic details of that website right inside your Google chat window. You can now easily run popular network commands inside Google Talk, Yahoo!, AOL or Windows Live messenger through IMified - just add imified@imified.com to your buddy list and start using the chat window as a network command line tool. Other than whois, commands like traceroute and ping can also be executed from GTalk. We earlier mentioned IMified as a quick tool for publishing posts  on Wordpress or Blogger blogs through messenger clients. The service has come a long way since then and now works seamlessly with tumblr, jaiku, twitter and so on. You can even use Imified to add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account from Google Talk. How cool is that. imified  | Add it to your friends list and the add the netlookup  widget.

GMail now has an inbuilt PPT viewer that lets you view Powerpoint attachment as a Flash picture slideshow in the web browser itself without requiring Microsoft PowerPoint application. This slideshow feature of GMail will be useful since you no longer have to download the full PPT attachment in order to view that 16th slide of the presentation. Here are two additional situations where it may help: 1. If you have to view a presentation on some computer that has no copy of PowerPoint, gmail yourself the PPT file and watch the slides inside the web browser. [similar to converting PDF to text using GMail] 2. GMail converts every slide of your Powerpoint presentation to a Flash (swf) file - if you manually advance the entire PPT slideshow using the arrows, all the slides will become available as Flash files in your browser's temp folder. Just a quick way of transforming Powerpoint slides into SWF documents without using any desktop conversion software. The swf files may then be emb

There exist hundreds of web analytics software  to help you understand how people discovered your website, how long they stayed on some web page, what browser they were using, etc. Whos.Amung.Us takes a different approach to web stats and answers two very useful questions in a visual manner. The questions are: (a) How many people are currently on your blog ? (b) What stories of your blog are they reading at the moment? whos.amung.us is not about pageviews or organic search keywords, it's about visualizing content that is being read by visitors on your blog this very moment. No registrations, no javascript, just insert a small HTML image code and your site stats will begin to show. You can also change the color of the widget to match your blog style. Like the del.icio.us tag cloud, this service will also show a list of your most popular blog pages - the larger the font, the more hits or more people reading that page. Since it uses a simple GIF or PNG image, you can use the se

If you are also excited about the new Safari Browser for Windows, please defer installing the beta version on your PC until Apple releases a new Safari patch the fixes the display problems. The current version of Safari, which is more of an alpha version, has problems rendering text on web page, adding bookmarks and crashes often. The Safari support forums on the Apple website are flooded with complaints from Windows Users who are also facing similar problems while loading web pages inside Safari. Infact, there seems to be a clash between the Lucida fonts bundled with Safari and the ones that are existing in your Windows fonts folder. If you use the Apple supplied fonts, your browser Menu bar, bookmarks and toolbars will either disappear or show greek characters. Related: Fix Font Display Issues in Windows Safari Look how the Yahoo! website appears inside Safari for Windows - the text near the Yahoo! services is not displayed while the news headline fonts are showing random char

Do you flip a coin in the air when choosing between two alternatives? Normally coin flipping requires a metal currency coin but you can now toss coins right inside your web browser using Coin Flipper from Random.org, a popular random number service. The interesting bit about Coin Flipper is that you can flip coins from several countries in different denominations - even the antique coins of the Roman era are available for flipping, virtually. Other than simulate the coin tossing activity, Random lets you simulate roll dices, pick state lottery ticket numbers or generate random bitmap images.  Random.org